I think there's a hole in the PHP typecasting methods:you have the (int) function, the (float) function and the (string) function, but no function to force a string variable into the boolean type.

It's obvious that forcing unconditionally the type of variables into arrays and objects is inappropriate, but boolean type is the most basic one for each programming language, that's why I guessed that a (bool) function already existed.

Moreover, with the increasing trend of RSS data streaming, the parsing of an XML string into an object often requires to typecast as boolean values the content of XML tags, normally returned as string by the object method get_content().

I wrote the following function, which also uses a "native PHP style" error message: